How to create an animated Electric Arc or Lightning?
I've experienced such need in my project long time ago. I did it with the help of Laplacian Lightning addon, too. My suggestion is:


For the varieties of lightning, you can keep on clicking generate lightning button on the Laplacian Lightning tool panel until getting enough varieties. It will generate random result each time based on the parameter setting.
For the "show time", first group them together, then simply add particle to a plane or something to emit that group, set Lifetime to 1. The Number value is quite nice for controlling the frequency.